you're too young & eager to love

New piece! With new characters!

Sometimes, after taking a hiatus from writing, I manage to come back and even impress myself. I applaud my muse of a Muffinpants for this.

Some reference pictures:

Young Margot - http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ATokN4zR8dg/TFHH_maOWFI/AAAAAAAAAF8/K_rZHsmkr0g/s1600/marion-cottillard.jpg

Current Margot - https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/5b/4d/ac/5b4dac2cdc01c4933efb6df0b492280f.jpg



The stupid house you made
fell away like paper lace.
Paper burns and paper fades and
paper crumbles into ugly shapes.
- Sunset Rubdown



1.

Margot finds the text messages on his phone when Kenneth is showering. The photos that leave an imprint on her brain, a visual scar every time she closes her eyes.

She spends what feels like a long time sitting on her (their) bed, the phone in her thin hands, swiping down the conversation screen. She stopped reading halfway through, but she feels compelled to continue looking. She isn’t sure what bothers her most: the adultery or the particular form it has taken.

Her husband is sleeping with a woman half his age. Half her age. He has the pictures to prove it. She has dark hair that falls around a small face and eyes that are bright, large, framed in thick lashes. She looks like she could be a barista or a bookstore clerk or a college student. She looks much like Margot had when she’d first met Kenneth.

It hurts. The agony in her belly is mounting, moving up into her chest. A spreading sickness that is caustic.

Her thoughts are muddled, and these first few moments of realization overwhelm her with layers of anger and shock, all painted in shades of pain.


Her husband doesn’t care about hiding his affair.
Or worse – her husband thinks she is so ignorant, so trusting, that he doesn’t need to bother deleting his text messages. He can even save sordid photos on his phone, because why would she look?
Her husband is fucking a girl.
Her husband is fucking a girl outside of his marriage.
Her husband is fucking a girl outside of his marriage and maybe not for the first time.
Her husband is fucking a girl, a child, and this home wrecking, inconsiderate little slut might be prettier than Margot is.
Or was.
Her husband is showering, and he’ll be done soon.


She leaves the phone on the bed.

She goes downstairs and makes coffee for them both.


2.

Kenneth leaves for work, his shirt devoid of wrinkles, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his smile disingenuous now that Margot has seen the insides of his life without her. She gets the horrible thought that maybe she has become his void; maybe this house, their marriage, their life is not what shelters him but the thing that he must escape from.

Her hands are shaking, but she pours herself another cup of coffee. She sits at her kitchen table. She can hear the birds outside, the automatic sprinklers watering the lawn, the bark of a neighbor’s rat-sized dog. Margot hates dogs. She hates this neighborhood too, their 300 thousand dollar house a mark of financial esteem but a sign, instead, of a suburban alcove that never fully accepted Margot. She hates the housewives that, like her, are filling their days with errands, with wine, with gardening. She hates how she has, more than once, broken a glass so that she might have something to pick up. She hates her need to occupy the hours until Kenneth returns and how that need has become more and more desperate throughout the years.

She used to spend her days writing, preparing for lectures, annotating next month’s memoir for a unit on creative non-fiction. She used to be what Kenneth called “intellectually active.”

She used to.

She used to have long hair. She used to drink tequila and smoke too many cigarettes. She used to wear jeans that were ripped at the knees and threadbare tank tops that never hid the pink shadow of her nipples. She was, once, a twenty-five year old who had already achieved an MFA in creative writing, whose novel was being published, who was preparing for interviews.

Had Kenneth been cheating on her then? When he had devoted his time and money to supporting her graduate degree, her novel? When he went to every interview? When he bought her a diamond ring and knelt on the street and promised that he would always love her?

Margot doesn’t know, and the silence of her unanswered questions expands into the house.

There’s penance in listening, she thinks.


3.


Margot with her hands in dirty dishwater. Margot with her hands submerged, the water still too hot despite the grease, the scraps of dinner bloated and dissolving at the bottom of the basin. Her skin is too thin so it burns.

In the winter months her fingers crack and bleed but there is no cold to blame now. It’s spring and the heat is already blossoming. It’s thick and damp, keeping close company like an uninvited guest. She’s been having trouble with the lawn because of it. The hedge-clippers snapped earlier, and her shoulders are red from being bared to the sun too long.

She cleans the kitchen until it shines, until it’s pristine. When she can see her reflection in the stove, she drops to hands and knees and starts scrubbing the floor. The work barely serves as a distraction for her. If anything, it offers more time for her to dwell. In the laundry room Kenneth’s dirty shirts stink of stale smoke and spilled beer, dried sweat like an offering to her, putrid and male, evidence of a life she only partially shares in.

She does the ironing next.

Margot burns the inside of her arm when she reaches for a shirt. She hisses under her breath. In the same room, Kenneth watches the Vikings play Green Bay, but he talks about the Saints.


4.


She waits three weeks before she confronts him.

By that time, the house is spotless.


5.


“I know you’re upset,” Kenneth says. “I know that I have ... I’ve made you angry. But you, you are my wife, and I – ”

Margot slams the bedroom door. She doesn’t walk through it; she doesn’t close it behind her. She simply wants to stop him from speaking, and it works. The noise cuts him off mid-sentence, just as his indignation crests and begins to crash down angrily. Messily.

The silence that settles is palpable. She would describe it as pregnant. The word stirs old feelings, opens wounds that never fully healed, and she can feel her mouth tremble. She rubs at her lips, those betrayers of her emotion, stubbornly.

Kenneth’s voice cracks when he says, “Please.”


6.


There are three secrets Margot keeps from herself:

1. She had wanted a son.

They hadn’t planned on having children. Kenneth had made detective right after her novel truly became successful. Married early, they had undergone the same struggles as others, only to finish on top. At the time, she hadn’t been able to fathom why they were worth such luck. She was tenure-bound, working on the sequel to Albtraum, and then it had happened. Unplanned. Accidentally. But Margot found she warmed to the idea of motherhood quickly, and it had been her idea to take a respite from teaching. She would have more time to write, more time to baby-proof, more time to trade in holed jeans for maternity dresses and cigarettes for prenatal vitamins.

When she began to show, when the curve of her stomach brimmed full with life, her secret hardened itself, calcified into something mean and unforgivable inside of her. Sitting out on her mother’s back porch (never her father’s, never joint ownership, always her mother’s), she had looked at her mother with little more than barely tolerant disappointment and pity.

She knew girls were more difficult to govern than boys.

There were too many ways for a girl to go wrong.

2. She tells herself differently, but she has distrusted Kenneth for years.

Suspicion and doubt arrived as easy as any expected marital love and affection during that first year. She accepted it that first year, she accepted him, and only in secret considers this her mistake. She can thread the causality back to her for allowing Kenneth to be this man, the one who can be so dishonest while looking her square in the eye.

This distrust lives like a monster under their bed, slithering out to keep her company the nights she lays alone, Kenneth’s side of the mattress cold.

3. The third secret is new to her.

The third is still too bright, too sharp and shameful for her to touch on, even in these self-denying moments.

Margot is learning to want again. She thought she had everything. There was a vision, a portrait, of a life worth living. She had that. To want anything more would be, as her mother would say, unchristian.

She wants so much more.

Trying to get into Margot's writing mindset. Or her lack of it, as it may be now.

I was going to wrap this up with a more concrete ending, but I ran out of steam.

--


Kenneth is straightening his tie. He’s using the mirror she hung by the front door. Originally, she thought she would need it for last-minute lipstick touch-ups, but Kenneth uses it more often than she does.

He speaks around his sunglasses that are dangling from his mouth, so he sounds like he’s mumbling. “Are you going to try writing today?”

She graces him with a smile that is all teeth. Her hands are soft when she comes up to him from behind and touches him, smoothing out the back of his shirt. “Like I do every day. I have some time after I run to the store. We’re out of milk.”

He makes a noncommittal noise, a huff from the back of his throat, and kisses the top of her nose before leaving.

She hates when he does that. It makes her feel like a child.



Her office has become a place for bills. A place for filing and records. For the shredding of private documents and failed drafts. It used to be a nest, a creative birthing unit. She once kept immaculate notes pinned to the entire back wall. She had stacked books by her desk for reference, color coting their pages with post-its. Kenneth had never ventured beyond the threshold. He didn’t even knock if the door was closed.

These days, the door is always open. Her computer sits, waiting, blank except for the Safari browser left open. A page of so-called easy recipes for busy weeknight dinners.

With a glass of sweet tea in hand, Margot thinks she might start reclaiming the space. That today is the day where she will finally renew her abilities. Through the shifting of furniture and the decluttering of files, she will see what she once had obtained. The pieces will fall together. Her Word Document will be more than half-hearted notes and unfinished sentences.

She will do this after she gets milk and before she vacuums. She is convinced.



Sometimes, if she’s feeling particularly masochistic, she watches her old interviews. There aren’t many, only a handful, but there’s enough to remind her of how she once was – the potential she had. Her favorite is the second one when she was asked to discuss character creation for a literary magazine of mild repute. The interviewer had been a recent graduate, and he kept pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose while they talked. His shorthand was illegible, but he’d had enough insight to record the interview for reference. He sent her a copy afterwards as a memento. It was a nice personal touch; Margot doesn’t think most interviewers would do that now.

Her youth surprises her every time. She forgets how long her hair was or how easily she used to laugh. Her nervousness is noticeable but so is her excitement. Clearly riding the high that is success, her younger self has a habit of smiling while she speaks, of gesturing wildly with her hands. They flutter around her lap like butterflies, punctuating her sentences.

The interviewer asks about Harrow, one of the characters she is most proud of for his ability to be both villainous and occasionally sympathetic.

On screen the younger Margot answers, speaking softly, intimately, but at length. Her excitement makes her breathy. “We’re talking about a rapist, essentially, and a narcissist. But the thing with Harrow is that the act of sex is something he doesn’t particularly like. Something about it feels unnatural to him. Uncomfortable psychologically, like he’s putting on an act. I always imagine Harrow as the man who sees sex as dominance, which is a popular conception in today’s young men, but not an act to appreciate for any other reasons. Sex is a base urge and Harrow wants to be above his baser impulses. Harrow might force Ita, during their early days, into a brutal sexual encounter and then disappear by himself afterward, trying to breathe through that uncomfortable feeling. It’s not guilt. It’s ego. He might intellectualize the sex in the abstract but in the context of his own life, he understands it’s a performance that is expected of him. If you remember, one of his first initiations for Roman is to witness Roman having sex with one of the companions. As an extension of himself, he needs Roman to perform too. Without the threat of a romantic connection.”

“This a complicated stance on what should be an intimate act. What did you do to consider his mindset? Do you make comparisons with your own life, your own marriage?”

The camera is focused on Margot; she can hear the interviewer but she can’t see him in the recording. On screen she laughs – it’s a bold insinuation to make, and Margot remembers feeling surprised by the suggestion, amused even. As a rule, she always kept her interviews on topic, on the work, on the art. She used to dodge questions about her personal life, for Kenneth’s sake, and maybe her own.

She hears herself answer diplomatically. “Most authors pull from inspiration they are familiar with. We know this. Write what you know, right? Lesson number one. I may be inspired by my own life at times, but this is ultimately a work about societal anxieties at large. The characters are representations of a deeper psychosis.”

She stops the interview.

She isn’t sure if she feels the same now.